In the very beginning, it wasn’t clear that television – coined from Greek tele (far) and Latin-derived vision, and first used in 1907 to describe a purely hypothetical technology – would be the name of the new medium. The alternative telephote was proposed as far back as 1880, and televista in 1904. The American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins, who transmitted pictures of U.S. Secretary of Commerce (and later President) Herbert Hoover in 1923, called his system radiovision. Philo T. Farnsworth, who developed the first working electronic camera tube in 1927, called his invention an image dissector.

Purists like C.P. Scott, the British publisher and politician, sniffed at television’s hybrid origins. “Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it,” Scott said in 1936.

Read the rest of “Television, in Other Words,” including an explanation of new TV terms such as OTT, cord-never, and household-addressable.

January 15, 2014

“Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy,” writes Trello founder Dan Ostlund (“The Agonies of Picking a Product Name”). His detailed account of his own DIY effort is a cautionary tale, although he doesn’t explain why the company felt it necessary to jettison its perfectly good placeholder name.

*

Top executives writing about verbal branding may be a trend now. Here’s Larry D. Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, on how his organization developed a new tagline (“What’s in a Tagline?”):

When I first proposed reexamining the tagline, I felt almost sheepish. The Hewlett Foundation pays little attention to self-promotion (that itself is a core value here), so why bother putting time and effort into something so marginal. Instead, the project proved to be both interesting and fruitful—an opportunity to reaffirm and remind ourselves about who we are and who we want to be.

You’ll have to scroll down to the tenth paragraph to learn what the new tagline is. Otherwise, nice process story.

This parody trailer for the new Muppet movie, Muppets Most Wanted, aired during Sunday night’s live Golden Globes broadcast, and it was so smart and funny I wished I could hit the rewind button. AdFreak says the promo “does a double public service by also making fun of all the mass-media self-adulation that studios crank out during Hollywood awards season.”

*

The Oxford University Press blog has a comprehensive words-of-the-year roundup that includes words of the year in Spain, Norway, France, and elsewhere. I’m fond of “plénior,” the mot nouveau pour 2014; it’s a more positive word for “senior citizen” that implies “full of life.”

*

While we’re in Oxford, check out the Oxford English Dictionary birthday word generator, which scours the OED database for words’ first occurrences, 1900 through 2004, and offers up one for your birth year. If you were born in 1984, for example, your word is “shopaholic.” Happy 30th, you crazy shopper, you!

“Unneeded warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who actually don’t know how to identify instances of what they are warning against, and the people they aim to educate or intimidate don’t know enough grammar to reject the nonsense they are offered. The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.” That’s linguist Geoffrey Pullum in “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive.” It will be published later this year in the journal Language and Communication; but you can read the PDF now.Pullum cites 46 examples of tsk-tsking about “passive” constructions that aren’t passive at all.

October 18, 2013

It’s Portmanteauber! But first, let’s welcome the return of the Name of the Year Tournament, “a celebration of unconventional names and the people who wear them.” After a 30-year run, NOTY’s originators stepped down in 2012; the tournament is now run “by two recent graduates of a university near Chicago” with “boring names” who are carrying on the tradition under a new URL. This year’s brackets include Hurricane Weathers, Fancy English, and Leila Bossy-Nobs. Go forth and vote!

*

“One of my biggest language pet peeves is the phrase ‘That’s not a word’,” writes James Callan, a content strategist and linguistics aficionado in Seattle. So he launched the Nixicon “to find and retweet people on Twitter who claimed that something isn’t a word.” In less than a week he’d discovered and circulated more than 200 “not a word” tweets.

A few days after starting this, one thing is clear: people really hate irregardless, ain't, and mines.

As for the Nixicon name, James says it’s “a portmanteau of ‘nix’ (meaning ‘no’) and ‘lexicon’.”

*

Speaking of non-words and portmanteaus, in May 2012 a group of lexicographers, poets, and authors coined “phubbing”—a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing”—to describe “the phenomenon of ignoring people in front of you in favor of paying attention to your phone,” according to an article in Advertising Age. Since then, the ad agency McCann Melbourne has been seeding the word—on Facebook and the StopPhubbing website, among other platforms—as a way to create interest in, and sell more copies of, a new edition of Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. The Wordability blog (which slightly misrepresents the word’s origin) calls phubbing “the best new word of the year” and says the word’s rise demonstrates “all that is good about modern word formation.”

Watch Macquairie’s video about the birth and spread of “phubbing.”

*

Why do some invented words—gobbledygook, blurb, and smog, for example—catch on? Ralph Keyes writes in The American Scholar that “need and usefulness” and the ability to “capture a widespread sensibility” are key indicators. So is playfulness: “A remarkable number of terms we use today originated in the speech bubbles and captions of cartoonists,” Keyes observes.

Thirty days hath Septaper? In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at “the financial word of the moment,” taper, and how it gave rise to the portmanteaus Septaper (a gradual slowdown of bond-buying in September) and Octaper (ditto, for October). “September through December seem to lend themselves to creative blending,” Ben writes, “perhaps because the names form a prosodic pattern: each is a three-syllable sequence with a stressed middle syllable (i.e., an amphibrach) and ends in -er.” My own “portmonthteau” sightings include Socktober, Sharktober, OAKtober (celebrating the Oakland A’s), and Archtober (pronounced, perplexingly, ark-tober). (And see my 2012 post on X-toberfest.)

Another sadder-but-wiser tale: How not to name your restaurant. Author David Lizerbram, a trademark lawyer, leads off the story by observing: “It’s always astonishing to me that businesses will invest countless dollars in every aspect of their operations while relying on a name that will only bring legal issues.” Hear, hear!

If you’re launching a fashion brand, should you follow the traditional route and name it after yourself (which worked fine for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Betsey Johnson)? Or should you follow the lead of some younger designers and choose a quirky name like Creatures of the Wind? Mark Prus, guest-blogging for Duets Blog, weighs the costs and benefits of “strange” as a naming strategy.

The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you ‘The Tawny One’, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert’.”

August 15, 2012

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

*

My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

*

I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

*

“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

*

A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

*

From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

*

Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Guest-blogging at Midlife Mixtape, Alexandra Rosas of Good Day, Regular People teaches us some useful Colombian idioms. I’m partial to ¿Y quién pidió el pollo? which translates literally to “And who ordered the chicken?” but is infinitely more versatile.

I think “Know Canada” is a brilliant slogan. Inexplicably, though, Studio360Redesigns conducted a separate contest, open to nonprofessionals, and chose a different slogan. I can’t say I share the judges’ enthusiasm for “Canada: We’re Not Just Colder, We’re Cooler.” Meh.

June 18, 2012

“Dark money” is a new twist on “soft money”—unrestricted political contributions used by political parties to elect candidates. (“Hard money,” by contrast, is regulated by the Federal Election Commission and limited to $5,000 per year per contributor.) This sense of “soft money” has been around since at least the early 1990s. The first usage I found of “dark money” is in an October 2010 report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency. The report, “Follow the Dark Money,” was published just before the midterm elections. It asserted in its first paragraph:

As much as $110 million has been pumped into the elections so far by political groups that have yet to disclose their donors, reports submitted to the Federal Election Commission show, and this “dark money” from unknown contributors has impacted 168 congressional races across the country.

That money flood was the direct consequence of a pair of 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission—that rewrote campaign-finance law to allow unlimited contributions from individuals, unions, and corporations as long as those expenditures were “independent” (not directly connected to a candidate or party).

The majority opinion in Citizens United stressed the importance of “prompt disclosure of expenditures” to “provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.” In practice, however, disclosure has been notably absent.

Mother Jones, the nonprofit investigative magazine familiarly called MoJo, picked up the “dark money” tag in 2011 and in April 2012 turned it into a regular beat covered by reporter Andy Kroll. Another reporter, Gavin Aronsen, writes the “This Week in Dark Money” post for the magazine’s Political Mojo blog. Mother Jones has devoted two issues, including the current one, to the dark-money theme.

MoJo’s co-editors, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, talked about dark money in a recent interview with Bill Moyers. At about 3:58, Moyers asked about the origins of “dark money.”

Moyers: What were you after there? Why that term?

Jeffery: We were searching around for a metaphor, and we had some celestial inspiration, as it were. Because like dark matter, which is something that’s in the universe and we know is very powerful but we don’t really understand it and we can’t really see it and we’re only beginning to be able to measure it– that’s true of dark money. Especially since Citizens United, there’s just so much unregulated, undisclosed money flowing through SuperPACs and their 501cs. To paraphrase [Arizona Senator] John McCain, very often we don’t know where the money’s coming from, who it’s going to, what its purpose is—it’s just out there. We can see the effects of it later, but we don’t know in anything close to real time what’s being raised and spent.

Dark money is “two-thirds to three-quarters Republican,” Bauerlein told Moyers. “Both sides can play this game,” she said, “but Republicans have an inherent advantage in that their natural constituency has a lot more money.”

__

For more on 2012 campaign lingo, see my Visual Thesaurus columns published May 16 and May 23.

Meh. The monosyllabic expression of disappointment has been used for the Republican contest in general and especially for candidate Romney, who has failed to generate much enthusiasm among voters. Punning on the candidate’s name, reporters and humorists started referring to “Meh Romney.” (There’s even a Tumblr blog where you can download a Meh Romney poster.) Meh was popularized by a 1995 episode of “The Simpsons” (“Lisa’s Wedding”), but Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer has traced it further back to a Yiddish source.

May 16, 2012

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, published today, I consider some buzzwords and catchphrases of the current U.S. presidential campaign, which is entering the general-election phase. It’s the first of two columns, organized alphabetically, so if you don’t see one of your favorite words or phrases, check back in a week or so.

Here’s an excerpt from this week’s installment. You’ll need to subscribe to read the rest!

Forward. The Obama campaign's slogan — “Forward” — made its debut in late April. Pundits immediately parsed it as if it were the Rosetta Stone. Buzzfeed claimed the slogan was borrowed from the left-ish news channel MSNBC (“Lean Forward”); Slate saw a connection with a 2005 slogan used by Britain's Labour Party (“Forward, Not Back”). Other observers pointed to the centrist Israeli political party Kadimah (which means “forward” in Hebrew), to old Soviet slogans, and to the Jewish Daily Forward, which launched in New York in 1897 as a Yiddish-language newspaper and led many fights for social justice. The slogan also revived an old Democrats vs. Republicans joke: “If you want the car to go forward, put it in D; if you want to go backward, put it in R.”

May 07, 2012

Wantologist: A coach who sells his or her assistance to people unclear about what they want. A blend of want and -ologist (“specialist”). Derived from Want-ology, a trademark registered in 2008 to Dr. Kevin B. Kreitman, “cybernetician & Renaissance woman.” (“That’s Kevin—just like the man’s name. And yes, I am female.”)

Here’s how the Want-ology website explains it:

To get what you really want, you have to know what you really want. Feel really secure that your dream job won't trap you in a nightmare. And feel confident that you can avoid jumping “out of the frying pan into the fire” when you decide to go for it.

Want-ologyTM is the fundamental course that will focus you on what you truly want in a way that will enable you to make your dreams come true.

In a new book, The Outsourced Life: Intimate Life in Market Times, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild examines wantologists and their kin: dating coaches, wedding planners, Rent-a-Grandmas, photo-album assemblers, nameologists (who will name your baby for a fee), and so on. This passage comes from an excerpt published in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review:

After a 20-year career as a psychologist, Ms. [Katherine] Ziegler expanded her practice to include executive coaching, life coaching and wantology. Originally intended to help business managers make purchasing decisions, wantology is the brainchild of Kevin Kreitman, an industrial engineer who set up a two-day class to train life coaches to apply this method to individuals in private life. Ms. Ziegler took the course and was promptly certified in the new field.

…

Ms. Ziegler explains that the first step in thinking about a “want,” is to ask your client, “ ‘Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?’ A lot of people float. Then you ask, ‘What do you want to feel like once you have what you want?’ ”

…

Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

…

The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy.

Hochschild is not the only author asking these questions. Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, has just published What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which is also about what money can buy—a prison-cell upgrade and the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to name just two examples. An excerpt from Sandel’s book appeared in the April issue of the Atlantic.